Christopher Wylie, the Canadian whistleblower and data scientist at the centre of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, told MPs Tuesday that there are plenty more companies undertaking similar, potentially illegal activity using personal data stored online.

“The way I look at it is Cambridge Analytica is the canary in the coal mine. It’s the beginning not the end,” said Wylie.

He added that this breach has proven how “easy it is to misappropriate information, take funds from mysterious sources and then go and interfere in elections, partially in cyber space.”

Asked about whether there were other potentially criminal aspects of this case that the House ethics committee should be aware of, Wylie said he couldn’t speak to that in a public forum as investigations are ongoing.

After working as the Director of Research for Cambridge Analytica since 2013, Wylie revealed in mid-March that the the company was misusing the personal information of millions of Facebook users to sway various political elections around the world. Over 600,000 Canadians were targeted.

He said he drew the line and decided to go public when the company and its affiliates started to use voter suppression techniques during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“I was made aware of [the techniques] while I was there. My understanding of what the company was intending to do, I believe at the instigation of Steve Bannon and some of his colleagues in different packs, was to create lists of predominately African American voters and then look at what types of messaging would disengage them from politics further, which would then reduce the likelihood that they would vote.”

It’s a mechanism that’s been widely dubbed as “psychographic” micro-targeting. But Wylie said not all instances of this style of data aggregation and subsequent advertising are inherently egregious.

“If you collect data with awareness and consent than that is legitimate,” said Wylie.

This after Conservative MP Peter Kent put forward questions about Wylie’s involvement with the Liberal Research Bureau (LBR) in 2016, referencing an article by the Canadian Press that the data researcher pitched psychographic profiling techniques to the Liberals during that time.

“An acquaintance of yours said he or she had drinks with you in Ottawa in November 2015, a few weeks after the federal election, and the same acquaintance, quoted by Canadian Press, said you were shopping your Facebook data-mining techniques in Ottawa with the Liberals,” said Kent.

“Let me just be super clear right now, that is not accurate,” Wylie responded.

He added that his work at the LRB was focused primarily on improving caucus communications and finding basic metric solutions on social media.

“What I would just caution people of is to twist anything to do with data, or anything to do with the underling psychology of voters, into something nefarious when it doesn’t necessarily have to be.”

To which Kent responded, “there’s a fine line” between what constitutes as wrongdoing and what doesn’t.

Vice-chair of the committee, NDP MP Charlie Angus took the opportunity to ask Wylie about potential solutions that could be put in place to regulate the actions of major tech companies in influencing future elections.

“There’s a bigger question than just going after what happened in Brexit, what happened in Brexit could happen anywhere, whether it’s a provincial election, a national election, or an international referendum. We need to be getting our heads around this,” said Angus in a scrum with reporters.

There’s no way to avoid the digital nature of advertising, noted Wylie, of which micro-targeting is a major component. Right now, this technique allows people who create campaigns to “whisper something in each [constituents’] ear,” he explained.

Stricter rules around transparency would help alleviate the siloing of information.

“In the same way that you require transparency for donations and spending, require transparency for the use of information and advertising. So when a party puts out an ad online it should have to report that and it should also have to report who it’s going to. Personally I think companies should have to do that too. ”

He was sworn in at the beginning of the meeting after MPs voiced concerns that previous testimony had not been “forthcoming” with specific reference to small B.C. data firm AggregateIQ (AIQ), which is alleged to be intimately connected to the scandal.

Wylie said many of their comments during their appearance last month were “farcical” and that he was shocked by the representatives’ overall performance.

“I’m surprised and really disappointed that Jeff Silvester and Zack Massingham have decided to try to obfuscate or hide what happened,” he said. “There’s a lot of information that I think is really important for people to know about, regulators to know about, legislators to know about and they had every opportunity to participate and blow the whistle, and they decided not to.”

Angus said the committee will be asking AIQ to reappear and that if they decline, a subpoena is not out of the question.